Climate change is too important to ignore

4:01 PM,
Jan. 17, 2014

Ted Kaufman

Written by

Ted Kaufman

In the months after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly invoked the principle that if there's even a 1 percent chance of a terrorist attack, we must prepare as if it were a certainty.

Standing in line at a coffee shop during the recent wave of brutally cold weather I heard someone say, "This weather sure puts a nail in the whole global warming hoax." And I immediately thought of what became known as "the 1 percent doctrine."

Let me connect the dots. It is tough trying to convince people like the guy I was in line with that climate change is real and the odds are very good that it is caused by human ...